


Yuuri's Delivery Service

by thequadsquad



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Everybody is a witch, Kiki's Delivery Service Fusion, M/M, but I still work in as much ice magic as I can, for the aesthetic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 04:27:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13228059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thequadsquad/pseuds/thequadsquad
Summary: Yuuri runs a modest, if profitable, business brewing potions. He has his cabin in the woods and his work, both kept far away from the town and people there who would rather have any other witch than him.Rather unfortunately, two witches from the North seem intent on ruining his obscurity.





	Yuuri's Delivery Service

Yuuri is elbow deep in swamp mud, fishing for ice toads, when Vicchan starts barking. The hour is edging towards midday. Phichit is due for a pickup at noon and Yuuri still needs to bottle the Jubilee simmering on the stove and twine goat hair around the worry stones before his friend’s arrival.

“Vicchan,” he hushes. “Vicchan, quiet please.”

Out on the porch, the wind chime rattles a series of sharp, confused notes. Vicchan shoots off his bed and throws himself against the window, wiggling and barking with all his might. Yuuri’s shoulders grow tight, eyes rising to squint at the door. His glasses sit uselessly a few inches from the Jubilee cauldron.

“Phichit? Is that you?”

_Thump!_

A very heavy noise reverberates through his front door. The wood shakes. Yuuri goes still. He has both hands buried in the mud, cupped around the hard body of a toad. Letting it go now will spoil the whole batch.

“Phichit?” His voice wavers. Phichit would have responded. “Hello?”

Did he forget an order? Mess it up somehow? He _knew_ the last shipment of scrying water had seemed a bit blue. He shouldn’t have let it go.

A prickly sensation crawls down his neck. The last time he’d really messed up an order it had been so bad his sister had taken the train all the way up from Hasetsu to fix it. He tries to shove the memory away, but the look in her eyes – not mad, not even disappointed, just resigned – haunts him.

The scrying water couldn’t possibly have been that bad, could it? He was older now and a bit more experienced. He always double-checked his brews, sometimes triple-checked. He would have noticed. He more than likely would have noticed.

Unless – oh gods. What if he didn’t?

“Mari?” His voice rises tentatively, shaky in his ears. “Is it – Is that you?”

_THUMP!_

Another angry blow booms against his door. The windows quiver. Dust motes spin through the air.

Yuuri stares incredulously. Ridiculous as it seems, it sounds like someone is trying to kick in his door. Did he somehow offend a giant? A troll?

It can’t be. Yuuri hears the angry mutter of a very human voice, young and – was that Russian? Whoever it is they speak very fast and very loud. Yuuri thinks he catches his own name and perhaps the word ‘imposter’ and feels the line of tension unspool from his shoulders.

The voice belongs to a kid. Just a kid. Probably one that didn’t read the small print and ended up on the wrong side of one of Yuuri’s brews. He’s stirred in enough safeguards to guess the situation well enough. Nothing showed the error of selfishly misusing potions than splitting into a clone of all one’s own worse attributes.

Yuuri’s grip on the ice toad lessens. He didn’t make a mistake. Not this time. The sudden depletion of anxiety leaves him loose limbed and punchy.

To the rule breaker, he calls, “Sorry! The shop is closed. Please come back tomorrow.”

There’s a furious shout from outside. It’s a bit higher pitched, betraying the crack in the young intruder’s voice.

Yuuri hums, snapping the privacy wards into place around his workshop. The windchime stops ringing. Vicchan stops barking. No more kicks rattle the door.

Peace settles like a snowfall back over the workshop. Vicchan gives a huff and leaves the window, curling back on his pillow next to Yuuri’s workbench and drawing from him a smile. Yuuri tightens his hands around the ice toad, squeezes until the cured green icicle slides loose from under its tongue, and shakes his head.

Customers. Thank the gods not many of them bothered with his little shop in the woods.

 

*

 

The day Phichit met Yuuri he had been a literal ray of sunshine. It had been a ritual mishap – Phichit was always better with spoken charms than the more time consuming rites – and Yuuri was the only apprentice under Celestino with experience in runes.

They were meant to room together anyway. If their first week was spent with Yuuri pouring over books while Phichit whizzed, iridescent, around the room, not much changed when the blaze of light was replaced with a laughing, tumbling boy.

Today at noon, however, Phichit isn’t laughing. He gapes at Yuuri, making no move to help load the last few crates into the rig hooked up to his broom.

“Yuuri!” cries Phichit. He waves a scolding finger; face all scrunched nose and pursed lips. “You should be more careful! How do you know it wasn’t a serial killer? A serial _stalker!_ You could have been in real trouble. _”_

Yuuri frowns at the thought. “Don’t be silly,” he says. That was a bit far, even for Phichit’s usual fervor. “Who’d bother with me?”

Phichit glowers at him.

They stand outside, Phichit’s broom hovering a few feet in the air as Yuuri loads up orders into the harness hung beneath. The meadow around his little shop grows soft and sweet with the scent of his garden in bloom. Yuuri finishes tightening the straps around the Jubilee potions, which tinkle joyously.

Phichit mutters uneasily, wrapped around his phone. “How did he even find where you live? You’re the least plugged in person I know. You don’t even have a Facebook. You don’t even have _internet!_ ”

Yuuri ignores that old battle. It is one Yuuri stubbornly refuses to lose, even if it means sidestepping the topic every time Phichit or Mari think to nag him.

“It isn’t exactly a secret,” Yuuri says. “My scrying address is on my product label.”

Phichit throws his hands up. His phone, runed to near immortality, whips up and down like a yo-yo.

“Yuuri!” Phichit screeches. “You live in a _cabin_ in the _woods_! In what way does this end well?”

“It’s already over,” Yuuri says. “The side effects only last a day at most. I’m sure whoever it was will be long gone by tomorrow.”

All of his assurances don’t stop the dismayed look Phichit gives him.

 

*

 

It takes a pinky promise that Yuuri will scry for help if the stranger returns before Phichit departs. Despite all his friend’s mournful backward glances, Yuuri nearly forgets the whole thing by the next morning. Dawn comes with frost on the windows and on the porch and it all cracks as Yuuri comes flying out of his warm bed to check on the spring buds in his garden.

It’s been sunny all week. Sunny and warm. There’s absolutely no reason for frost to cling to the roots of his newly blooming marriage lace. By the droop of its leaves, the delicate strings of flowers will be blown away before the sun’s almost up. Marriage lace lasts all of an hour once pulled from the ground. If spun right, a single strand can heal a bullet wound.

Shears in one hand, vials in another, Yuuri loads the basket on the nose of his broom before the sun even clears the treetops. He kicks up. His little cabin disappears far below him as the world rolls out green and misty beneath his shoes. Sun on his back, broom to the ocean, Yuuri soars to town.

Ask a witch, any witch, what their favorite town is and they are bound to say their own.

For Yuuri, it’s a quaint, seaside village not all that different from Hasetsu. The buildings aren’t as old and there is no hot spring to speak off, but the whole town is built on a hill leading down to a white, sandy beach.

Yuuri touches down in a cobble-stoned plaza near the heart of town. Traffic in the streets runs slow. He assumes it’s a weekend – or perhaps the hour is earlier than he’d thought. Time isn’t a thing he pays attention to out in his cabin. A baker unloading a truck of bread does a double take at the sight of him. All around the plaza, heads crane to track his broomstick. Yuuri steps quickly from his landing site, tucking his broom under a hiding ward and into an alley, and seeks a quieter path.

His efforts matter little. Everywhere he walks, he can feel the stares and muttering follow. Glances, quick and fleeting, hard and long, shadow his trail. One little girl even stops dead at the sight of him. “Mommy. Mommy, _look!”_

Her mother tugs her along, muttering not to stare at witches.

Yuuri casts a disappearing charm then, stepping into invisibility the same way a person might walk beneath the shade of a tree. In Yuuri’s case, it’s more of a frail sapling, his shadow flickering in and out behind him as he speeds to the hospital, shoes gliding over the pavement like ice.

The white arches of the hospital rise quickly above him. Yuuri knows the inside of this building probably more than he does any other part of town, his potions specialty being of some use here and sometimes requiring his actual presence to work. A few of the nurses in the lobby are even familiar to him. Though their expressions are stiff with surprise, none of them actually complain about him showing up unexpected.

“We weren’t anticipating the your next delivery for another three weeks,” the head nurse frowns, leading him through the waiting room full of curious eyes and into the pharmacy. “Is this all of it?”

Yuuri flushes and looks down. The three pitiful jars he’d collected are almost half that which his marriage lace had been scheduled to yield. It’s a finicky crop, but he’s never failed so utterly with it before. He won’t be able to plant it again until next winter. “I’m sorry,” he says.

The head nurse is kind. She just sighs, unlocking the carefully spelled time-stasis drawer and securing the vials inside. “It’s fine. We’ll make due.”

But it isn’t fine. Yuuri _knows_ how much the hospital depends on him to deliver and he didn’t. If the people of his town suffer because their wares run short, that suffering belongs to him.

“I could supplement it,” Yuuri says quickly. “Skin knitting patches and blood replenishing potions should cover all but the worst injuries lace is typically used for. There may be a way I can plant another batch in my winter greenhouse. It’ll take a few months. I’m very sorry.”

His mind is churning. Replanting will cost him several meters in an already crowded greenhouse, each marriage lace needing at least a meter of free soil to spread its delicate root systems. There’s a reason marriage lace is produced almost entirely in specialized farms, but he can do it. He’s almost certain he can do it.

The head nurse doesn’t look so sure. She shakes her head. “Don’t put yourself out. You’re busy, I’m sure.”

Yuuri raises his head. “I’ll do it,” he promises. “It’s my responsibility.”

“Well,” says the head nurse, sucking in a breath. She leaves it like that.

He departs from the hospital with an empty basket and a swarm of buzzing anxieties rattling in his head. He’ll need to triple his supply of fiddle-leaf figs for the skin patches, which he can’t all grow on his own. He’ll need to call home; perhaps see if he can skim from his parents’ garden which he _hates_ doing. He’ll have to tell Phichit he’s putting a cap on his private sales too. This project will consume a lot of time and boiling acne cures and wrinkle creams will just have to wait.

So caught in logistics, Yuuri barely notices when he crosses back into the central plaza. He doesn’t notice at all the figure coming down the street towards him until he ricochets right off of him and onto the ground.

“Sorry, so sorry!” Yuuri scrambles to his knees, bowing his head. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

An amused huff sounds above him. “So I see,” says the person Yuuri knocked into. The stranger’s voice is drawling and casual, boyish but deep. Heat blooms on Yuuri’s face. “Perhaps these would help?”

A pale hand dangles a pair of glasses in front of his face. Yuuri’s glasses.

Yuuri shoves his feet under knees, standing up. He hangs his head, knowing his face must be horribly red. “I am _so_ sorry,” he says again, taking his glasses and sliding them back onto his nose.

Except – his glasses must have broken on the sidewalk. Or maybe Yuuri actually hit his head and got a concussion. Or a coma. What he sees is impossible.

Viktor Nikiforov – _the_ Victor Nikiforov, the shining jewel of St. Petersburg, rumored heir to the high coven of Russia – smiles down at him. Yuuri knows the shining silver of his hair and the blue of his eyes, gleaming as though composed of moonlight. His face is poised and handsome. As in every magazine, his smile is devastating. Leaning against his shoulder, casual as anything, rests a long, golden broomstick.

Yuuri’s heart lifts out of his chest and shatters somewhere beneath his toes.

Viktor Nikiforov peers down at him. “Are you alright? You don’t look so well.”

A sound slips out of Yuuri. Not a word. A confused, petrified sound, like someone has taken his lungs and squeezed.

Viktor frowns at him, tapping a finger to his lips. He brightens up in the next second. “I know! You’ve just had a bit of a shock. I’ll give quick pick-me-up spell, free of charge! That usually does the trick.”

No. Oh no. He _couldn’t possibly -_

Viktor snaps his fingers before Yuuri can stop him. A rush of warm, bubbling happiness careens through Yuuri’s veins, dizzying as a whirl-around and twice as sweet as cotton candy. Yuuri staggers backwards. For exactly one second, he feels perfectly content in the world, not just content – blissful.

A moment later and he’s bent over his knees, gagging up icicles into the street.

“Huh,” Viktor says, distantly above his head. “That’s never happened to me before.”

Yuuri heaves in huge gulps of air, hands shaking from the remaining rush of cheap happiness. His mouth tastes like snow. His throat feels all frozen. Not one moment of that discomfort stops him from wheeling on the other witch the moment he stops retching.

“Are you – Are you insane?” Yuuri demands.

Viktor pulls back, looking faintly startled. “It was just a little pick-me-up. You should be feeling much better now!” He points at Yuuri’s face. “Ah, see! You are regaining color.”

What Yuuri is regaining is his senses – and his temper. They say you should never meet you idols. Yuuri – who has _pictures_ of Viktor’s smiling face plastered on his Hasetsu walls – means to burn them.

“You can’t just go around _spelling_ people without their permission!” he shouts. A few seagulls burst into the sky. Yuuri can feel his magic bubbling up in him like the worst sort of thick, globby potion. His feet grow lighter on the pavement. Yuuri drags down another deep breath before he goes flying off for real.

Meanwhile, Viktor has retreated behind a stiff smile and a raised hand. “It really is a very simple spell,” he says. “More of a party trick than anything. Ask any local witch and they’ll tell you the same.”

_Ask any local witch_.

Gravity descends on Yuuri with all the weight of an avalanche. His heals return to the pavement.

Viktor Nikiforov doesn’t recognize him. Viktor doesn’t even realize that Yuuri is a witch. Not even when Yuuri is standing right in front of him, bubbling with caustic magic.

The shock of their sudden meeting is wearing off. In a bitter dose of reality Yuuri understands that Viktor hasn’t even asked for permission before entering the center of Yuuri’s town. It was the most basic of witch courtesies. Not even the worst of enemies would be so bold. Blood feuds had been started on far less.

(For only a moment, Yuuri’s mind runs to the knocks on his door yesterday, but the voice is wrong – all wrong – and he knows his wards would have crumbled had it been Viktor trying to get inside.)

His temper retreats like the sea, leaving Yuuri bared to Viktor as sand before the sun. He winces, cringing down, noticing for the first time the commotion they’ve caused. Motion in the square has all but stopped, faces pinched and worried as they steal glances in Yuuri and Viktor’s direction.

“I need to leave,” Yuuri mutters.

Viktor glances at him. He too, seems to have noticed the growing attention, and is studying the locals with interest.

Yuuri shoves down the ferocity that gathers in his chest when he sees it. This is _his_ town. _His_. Viktor hadn’t even _asked_ before coming in.

“Goodbye, Viktor,” he says and means it. He turns on his heel, fists clenched as he walks away. He doesn’t waste time second-guessing that decision. His broom isn’t too far from here. He can be airborne in minutes.

He’s ill prepared for the footsteps that follow him. “Oh, wait,” calls Viktor, appearing by his side. “Wait just a minute.”

Yuuri wills a burst of speed into his steps, irrationally irritated when Viktor keeps stride perfectly. “I have to go,” Yuuri says. “Excuse me.”

“You _know_ me,” says Viktor and Yuuri hates the way Viktor’s smile makes his eyes crinkle.

“I don’t,” Yuuri snaps. He isn’t lying. The idol he had worshipped certainly wasn’t the man he’d just met.

“You knew my name,” pushes Viktor, “maybe you know more. I’m looking for another witch. He should be in this town.”

Yuuri pulls up short. “ _Another_ witch?” he says, suspiciously. Yuuri’s feet have been all but flying on the pavement in an effort to get away and _still_ Viktor doesn’t recognize him.

Or maybe he does and this just some… trick? Is Yuuri’s magic so pathetic even Viktor Nikiforov can’t sense him?

Viktor just looks pleased that Yuuri has stopped. “That’s right. Another witch. Younger than me. I heard rumors that he landed here recently, but no one could tell me where to find him.” He shrugs, pushing his hair out of his eyes and smiling in a way meant to be disarming. To Yuuri’s immense pain, he feels his knees quiver as Viktor sends him a new smile. “You seem to know a thing about witches. Have you seen this one?”

“ _No,”_ Yuuri grinds out.

He turns to leave again. Viktor’s fingers skim his wrists, like he wants to grab him. Yuuri’s traitorous body jerks around.

“Please,” says Viktor and that is far, far too much for Yuuri. “He’s very young and very foolish. You have no idea the kind of trouble he may have gotten into, and me. You probably even know him. His name is Yuri” -- Yuuri jerks. This _has_ to be a joke -- “Yuri Plisetsky.”

Of course. Now that Viktor says it, Yuuri knows exactly who he means. It had been huge news – _Viktor Nikiforov Finally Takes An Apprentice!_ The headline had run for weeks over the summer, along with the profile shot of a fey-featured young witch in resplendent white robes.

So, there is not just one famous, unwelcomed witch in his town, but two.

“Unwelcomed?” repeats Viktor. It takes Yuuri a moment to realize he must have spoken that last thought aloud.

“Well,” says Yuuri, painfully awkward. _Surely_ Viktor can see him. He’s standing right in front of him. Did Viktor expect a warm welcome – _now?_ “Yes.”

Viktor blinks rapidly. “There’s a local witch,” he says. His tone is one of realization. “That’s impossible. I scanned the whole town. There was hardly any magic at all. Certainly not enough to have a _witch_ in town.”

He’s speaking to himself, Yuuri forgotten, which leaves Yuuri in the fortunate enough position to swallow the ugly expression pulling on the edges of his mouth. _Hardly any magic_. That sounded like Yuuri exactly. Barely enough for the most basic of spells. Hardly enough to call himself a witch at all. Not like Viktor.

Yuuri steps carefully away from Viktor. Viktor doesn’t even glance at him. This time when he leaves no one follows.

 

*

**Author's Note:**

> Hi folks. Thanks for reading!
> 
> I am posting this mostly as a stress relief and intend to keep it fairly low priority. Bear in mind there will be mistakes, I'm sure, and delays. That said, if you catch anything terrible, feel free to let me know below.


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